ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH INFORMATION

E&H Consultative Forum19 October 2005

•Process•Content 1: Ambient Air Quality

Process

• Series of meetings focusing on four main exposure routes, plus two other issues– Ambient air– Indoor air– Drinking water/bathing water– Food– Physical stressors (noise, EMF, UV, ionising radiation, others)– E&H tracking systems

• Objectives– To work with the policy leads and their technical contacts– To analyse the existing information framework and develop

actions to improve it for the short, medium and long term– To focus on actions on information, analysis and presentation– To identify cross-cutting issues

Technical preparation

• Outcome– Detailed Implementation Plan for E&H

Information System (by early 2006)

• Support: two contracts– Technical support : about to be awarded:

will run until April 2006– Scientific Support for Policy: in fifth call, to

be published late 2005

Technical preparation

• Integration with ENHIS and ENHIS 2– Principal contact with WP 5– Ambient Air Quality and DW conclusions

reflected in Content 1 and 3– Indoor air and noise will be reflected in

Content 4 and 5 respectively– Development of information system using

currently available information will proceed in parallel

First output

• on ambient air quality

– Draft document 23 September.

• on drinking water/bathing water• on exposure through food

– Drafts 11 October.

Written comments welcome

– By 11 November.

Next steps in technical preparation• Second public drafts plus further meetings if

necessary– ambient air– DW/BW– foodMid December 2005

• First meetings and first public drafts– indoor air– physical stressors (noise, EMF, radiation)– E&H TrackingMid December 2005

• Written comments by mid/end January

Next steps in technical preparation• AFSSE workshop on E&H Information systems

– 5-6 December 2005

• Final reports for all six subjects

• Integration into an Implementation Plan– February/March 2006

• Consultation meeting end Feb/beginning March

Financial preparation• Need to identify tasks precisely and match with suitable

funding from FP7, LIFE+, Public Health programme

– Environmental monitoring under LIFE+– Infrastructure-related elements possibly under Research

Infrastructure budget line of FP7– Support under the Environment theme of FP7– Health endpoint information under Public Health and Consumer

Protection Programme.

• Possible scope for use of E budget lines of DG INFSO, for presentation aspect

• More clarity on funding possibilities as information needs become clearer

Deadlines

11/11: Written comments on first three issues

16/12: Revised documents on first three issuesFirst documents on second three

issues» Indoor air» Noise» Environmental Public Health Tracking

24/1/06: Deadline for written comments

22/2/06: Final drafts of all six reports.First draft of Implementation Plan.

3/06: Consultation and final draft of IP.

Content 1: Air Quality

• Priority substances and emerging issues• Exposure

– Monitoring– Modelling– Personal exposure monitoring– Biomonitoring

• Health effects monitoring• Epidemiology• Source-receptor relations• Toxicology

Concentration monitoring•Hemispheric (isolated stations)•Regional•Urban background (twin stations)•Hot-spots

Ambient air monitoring network

Speciation monitoring

•Superstations

Modelling

Dispersion

Sources

Reduction scenarios at regional, urban, hot-spot scales

Exposure: population distribution of concentrations at regional, urban, hot-spot scales

Time-activity patterns

Exposure response relations

Health effect monitoring networkMortality and morbidity for COPD, lung cancer, childhood respiratory disease, etc. at regional, urban, hot-spot scales

Assessment of health impacts of ambient air on regional, urban and hot-spot scales

Economic assessment

Components of health impact assessment

Ambient Air

Priorities and emerging issues

Which substances should we focus on?

• Particulate matter

• Gaseous pollutants (ozone etc)

• New/emerging ambient air pollutants (RTD NORMAN project)

Exposure

• Maps of concentrations across Europe• Maps of population densities across Europe• Population distributions of concentrations

Monitoring

• Improve monitoring used to develop concentration maps at all geographical scales (hemispheric, regional, urban background, hotspot)

ExposureModelling• Calibrate major models against monitoring results.• Develop guidance on using models for concentration

mapping• Encourage adoption of new techniques (such as

‘adjoint’ techniques).

Monitoring of personal exposure• Not really useful for adapting the exposure metric

itself• Validation of concentration metric• For time series, the necessary work has largely been

done. For spatial contrasts, work is underway but more is still needed.

Exposure: biomonitoring

• Evidence that the current state of biomarkers for PM, NO2 insufficiently developed for policy use

• The emphasis for that reason has been on other approaches such as personal monitoring to validate exposure models, as discussed above.

• Identify extent to which biomarkers can be used for policy purposes in ambient air.

Health effects monitoring

Mortality– International Classification of Disease

coding is improving comparability.– The main outstanding problem is the long

delay required in some countries to get the most recent data.

– Concrete measures to address this delay?

Health effects monitoringMorbidity:

• For broad categories (respiratory, cardiovascular admissions etc.) ICD codes ensure comparability

• For more detailed categories data is less comparable.

• Develop survey of health impacts?– European Community Respiratory Health Survey– US experience (NHANES)– Collection of health statistics on a solid legal footing,

including the European Health Interview and Health Examination Surveys.

Epidemiology

• Develop infrastructure for epidemiological studies at EU level– supersites/superstations to allow very detailed time

resolution and speciation of pollutants– programme of combined health/air quality studies.– operational management of the stations should be

considered.

• Long-term studies a major priority– At least a decade of consistent funding– How to provide a basis for funding stretching across a

number of research funding cycles.

Source-receptor relations

For particulate matter:

• Exposure efficiency – proportion of a given exposure that ends up in the body (>> for transport than energy, for instance)

• Need research into source-resolved size distributions.

For gaseous pollutants:

• Current approach (emission inventories and modelling) works well for most common pollutants.

• But reassessment may be needed for some specific compounds ( dioxins, HMs, POPs).

Toxicology

• Mechanistic studies to identify exactly what is happening in the body.

• Predictive toxicology to assess which of the various new technologies offers the most promise in reducing toxic emissions.

• Studies combining epidemiology and toxicology (HEPMEAP, Health Effects Institute (HEI) research agenda).

Next steps

• Many actions are already underway and have responsibilities and resources allocated.

• Where not, identify the actors and resources required.

• Integrate with work on other exposure routes, principally indoor air.